Kronos Quartet Review in the New York Times

(photo by Jennifer Taylor)

...what an excellent weekend with the Kronos Quartet! Read below what Steve Smith of the NYTimes thought of the performance.

Before Friday night the Kronos Quartet had never played at Le Poisson Rouge, the Bleecker Street nightclub that has served as an epicenter for adventurous music ever since it opened just over two years ago. But Friday’s concert, the first of two that the quartet presented at the club over the weekend, felt more like a homecoming. Sold out well in advance, both events were crammed to capacity with friends and fans.

No surprise, really: Le Poisson Rouge, in both its chic veneer and its earnest disregard for genre boundaries, has embraced a style and ethos fostered by the Kronos Quartet for more than three decades. In any given week at the club you might hear classical post-Minimalism, beat-heavy electronica, evanescent chamber pop and clever world-music fusions. The quartet — David Harrington and John Sherba, violinists; Hank Dutt, violist; and Jeffrey Zeigler, cellist — packed all of that and still more into just two concerts.

Promiscuous even by Kronos standards, each program included several premieres, surrounded by a grab bag of works heard in the quartet’s recent concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Prospect Park Bandshell. Unusually, though, the playing on Friday didn’t always live up to the group’s usual high standard. Several times during the evening intonation was less than ideal, and the ensemble playing in Bryce Dessner’s vibrant “Aheym,” which opened the program, was unsettled.

...to read the rest of the article "A Quartet Mixes It Up With Younger Voices" by Steve Smith, click here!